Well… I guess I will have a book out May 8 2018 under my SF pen name K. R. Richardson. Originally submitted as Scattered Objects, my SF police thriller will be released under the title BLOOD ORBIT by Pyr. (cover and websites to come in the new year.)

Tor.com is giving away a pile of books by all ten authors of INDIGO–the cooperative novel I worked on last year, which will be released June 20 by Macmillan. You know you (or some friends or family) want some of these, so go to the Tor.com Indigo Sweepstakes page and sign up!

My pseudonym, K. R. Richardson, has had a good day. This turned up on Friday at Publisher’s Marketplace (I’m told–I didn’t see it) and a shorter version appeared today at Quill & Quire:

K. R. Richardson’s novel SCATTERED OBJECTS, a gritty cop drama set in a futuristic, multi-layered and multi-racial society, where an idealistic rookie from a powerful family and the planet’s first cybernetically enhanced forensic investigator from an ethnic under-class must solve a brutal crime, to Rene Sears at Pyr Books, by Sally Harding at The Cooke Agency. (World English)

Executive Orders (also called Proclamations, Memoranda, and Letters depending on their scope and focus) are weird beasts. I’ll quote the Washington Post for a quick-and-dirty explanation: “Basically, an executive order is an official statement from the president about how the federal agencies he oversees are to use their resources.” [per Aaron Blake, The Fix, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/27/what-is-an-executive-order-and-how-do-president-trumps-stack-up/ ]. Although they aren’t specifically named, they are derived from Article II of the Constitution, describing “executive actions.”

I had labored under the assumption that EOs were a late-coming development, but, no, George Washington started them with his April 22, 1793 instruction to federal officers to prosecute any citizens interfering with the war between England and France. (Congress was out of session, so Washington was empowered to act “in emergency.”) And they’ve been with us ever since. HowStuffWorks.com has a pretty clear and simple article by Dave Roos about EOs, their origins, and how they work (or don’t) here: http://people.howstuffworks.com/executive-order.htm

And there you have it: Executive Orders and Trump’s EOs, as of Sunday January 29, 2017, to the best of my reportorial ability to ferret out weird facts. (I feel the need to break out my mad Journalism skillz once in a while.)